the Text Only Internet tool

How to use Textise

There are various methods you can use to easily access Textise, either from the home page or by using browser short-cuts.

Here are your options…

From the Home Page

This is the way Textise started out and it’s still a useful way of using the tool. Just navigate to http://www.textise.net and you’ll see an input box marked “URL or search term”. As the label suggests, this allows you to either type in a URL or input a word or phrase you’d like to search for. If you’re searching, the drop-down underneath allows you to specify which search engine to use. Hit “Textise” or “Search” and you’ll be taken to a text only page showing either the page you specified or the search results.

Note 1: If the string you enter doesn’t contain any full stops (aka periods, aka dots), the program will assume you’re searching (since a URL always contains at least one full stop), in which case it won’t matter which button you press.

Note 2: For URLs, the program will add missing information. For example, you can type in “bbc.co.uk” and Textise will understand that you mean http://www.bbc.co.uk.

Note 3: If you type in a URL and click “Search”, the program will search for the URL using the currently selected search engine.

Firefox Add-on

For Firefox users, I’ve created an add-on that makes it easy to flip in and out of text only mode. The add-on can be accessed from the the right-click menu or from the Tools menu. Click once to enter text only mode, click again to return to the original page.

Note 4: The Mozilla site currently shows a rating of 3 out of 5 for the add-on. This is unfortunately the result of problems I had with Firefox 3.6: the structure of add-ons was changed for this version and this broke my original code. In the end, I had to re-write it from scratch. The latest incarnation has survived all of Firefox’s recent rapid version changes.

Bookmarklet

The bookmarklet provides almost exactly the same functionality as the Firefox add-on but works with all the major browsers (including Firefox). The major difference is that the bookmarklet can be configured to sit in a browser’s bookmarks/favourites bar, making it very easy to click in and out of text only mode. The underlying code is exactly the same.